Fourth of 8 weekly articles documenting bias in “The Cambridge Student”: Lent 2009 Issue 4.
Fairly good article on the Tiger Temple in Kanchanaburi, a rather unpleasant place run by some stupid Buddhist monks who keep animals in very bad conditions. However, the authors believe that the key to preventing poaching, and thus stopping tigers going extinct, is education. I doubt “education” will have much effect on poachers. The only way to stop animals going extinct is to make it profitable to do so. In places where animals aren’t owned or can’t be legally used for profit, there is no incentive to cultivate them. Instead people try to kill and sell them as quickly as possible, before someone else does. It’s the classic “tragedy of the commons”. But if people can legally own and sell animals, they have massive incentive to keep them safe and breeding, as in the private game reserves of South Africa. But the property rights solution doesn’t even seem to be on the authors’ radar. Indeed, they dismiss tiger farms as “even less desirable”. Why?
In another article in “Thursday”, “TCS has picked two of the best” “projects to support”. A pity one is CUSU “Ethical Affairs” “Real Food Campaign”, which urges us to buy “locally grown, organic fruit and veg”. Organic food is absurd: its low yields would simply make it impossible to feed the world’s population, for no particular advantage. And why buy local? “People should stop talking about food miles”, says Adrian Williams of Cranfield University. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic… the idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one raised nearby – well, it’s just idiotic.”
According to “Food Miles – Comparative Energy/Emissions Performance of New Zealand’s Agriculture Industry”, from Lincoln University in New Zealand:
“New Zealand has greater production efficiency in many food commodities compared to the UK. For example New Zealand agriculture tends to apply fewer fertilizers (which require large amounts of energy to produce and cause significant CO2 emissions) and animals are able to graze year round outside eating grass instead of large quantities of brought-in feed such as concentrates. In the case of dairy and sheep meat production NZ is by far more energy efficient, even including the transport cost, than the UK, twice as efficient in the case of dairy, and four times as efficient in case of sheep meat. In the case of apples, NZ is more energy-efficient even though the energy embodied in capital items and other inputs data was not available for the UK.” According to the study, New Zealand lamb shipped to England by boat produces 688kg of CO2 emissions per ton, about 25 percent of the 2,849kg produced by most (but not all) British lamb. (Michael Shuman points out errors in the study, but correction would not change the overall point.)
In “Comparative Study of Cut Roses for the British Market Produced in
Kenya and the Netherlands”, Adrian Williams found that roses flown to the UK from the Netherlands leave six times the carbon footprint of Kenya roses, even accounting for air freight. It also is more efficient to grow green beans in Kenya than Europe, the latter with its intensive irrigation systems.
“Red, White And ‘Green’: The Cost Of Carbon In The Global Wine Trade” found that “many New Yorkers may be surprised that holding bottle mass constant, it is more “green” to drink wine from Bordeaux (1.8 kg) with a long sea voyage as opposed to a wine from Napa (2.6 kg) with a long truck trip.”
The TCS article also calls packaging “ridiculous”. I thought plastic-wrapped cucumbers were ridiculous too, but it turns out that packaging is actually good. It prolongs the shelf-life of food quite a lot, and cuts down on waste. According to the Cucumber Growers’ Association, plastic-wrapped cucumbers can last almost two weeks, but unwrapped ones are “unsaleable” after five. This also allows consumers to cut down on trips to the supermarket. It’s better to throw away packaging than throw away food.
TCS should be more inquisitive about which “projects to support”.
I’d like to be able to link to all the articles mentioned, so that readers can read them in full. Unfortunately not all TCS articles are put on the web. Ideally, TCS could put a PDF file of each week’s edition on their website, like Varsity.
